For some years now in France and the Anglo-Saxon countries, kinship has been eliciting greater interest and new analyses. The recent publication of four texts, three in French, one in English, is an occasion to assess how research problematics, knowledge, and debate have been evolving in this field that partakes of both anthropology and sociology. Detailed analysis of the texts shows that the various contrasting positions are organized around a set of questions concerned with biology and the social, questions raised more than twenty years ago by David M. Schneider, an atypical North American anthropologist little known in France. Schneider’s work appears today as a decisive turning point in the recent history of kinship studies.